guardian.co.uk,
Tania Branigan in Beijing, Thursday 14 June 2012
A graphic
photograph of a young Chinese woman lying beside the body of her aborted
seven-month-old foetus has roused fury over forced abortions in the country.
National
and provincial authorities say they are investigating claims that family
planning officials in Zengjia town, in the north-western Shaanxi province,
coerced Feng Jianmei into the termination.
While
forced abortions and sterilisations are illegal in China, experts have blamed
recurrent abuses on the pressure on officials to meet the strict birth control
targets. Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who fled to the US embassy
after years of imprisonment and house arrest, fell foul of authorities in the
eastern Shandong province for his work in supporting victims.
Feng's case
sparked outrage after a picture of the 22-year-old lying beside the aborted
baby circulated widely on Chinese websites and microblogs. "It is not
abortion. It is obviously murder!" said one comment. "Don't stain the
family planning policies through forced abortions," said another.
Feng's
husband, Deng Jiyuan, said Feng was "sad and distressed" after being
hooded, abducted and forcibly injected to induce the abortion. The couple had
failed to meet demands for 40,000 yuan for breaking birth control rules, he told the South China Morning Post.
"That's
more than what I earned in four years … We don't have that much money," he
said.
Zhenping
family-planning authorities said on Monday that Feng agreed to the abortion
"after repeated persuasion". But Feng told Radio Free Asia: "No,
it wasn't [with my consent]. It was forced. That's what happened."
Deng added:
"Several people pushed her into a car and then drove her to the hospital.
My family was barred from seeing her. She would not consent to the procedure,
so they forced her to put her fingerprint from her left hand on a document."
Deng said
he wrote about the case online after his complaints to local officials appeared
to have no effect. Most urban families are allowed to have one child, while
rural families can usually have a second if their first is a girl.
The couple
have one daughter, aged five. But an official from the Zhenping family planning
department said Feng had an urban household registration, or 'hukou'.
"She
would need to transfer her hukou to our township first before having the baby.
The money [40,000 yuan] was charged as a deposit for the transfer and would
have been paid back if her family had done so," Yuan Fang told China Radio
International.
A media
officer with the National Population and Family Planning Commission told the
English language edition of the state-run Global Times that it was
investigating. "We're trying to get the whole story. If it's true, local
family planning authorities will surely be punished severely," said the
officer.
Shaanxi
family planning officials said in a statement on their website that a team had
been sent to the area to investigate. They also issued a statement saying that
the rights of pregnant women should be respected and that late-term abortions
were prohibited.
Last year,
relatives of a 37-year-old woman said she died after she was forced to have alate-term abortion in eastern Shandong province. A statement on the Lijin
government website said Ma Jihong died in a "labour-inducing
operation", and it was investigating the case, vowing to punish any
officials found guilty of professional misconduct. But as of earlier this year
no investigation results had been announced and Lijin officials did not respond
to queries on Thursday.
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